Sunday, August 29, 2010

A nice lazy Sunday…

Its Sunday… a nice kind of lazy Sunday so needed to recover and recharge before returning to work tomorrow…

The weather in nice… not hot like last weekend (the first hot weather of the soon to be gone summer) but nice… sunny but not too hot. I retreated to the garden to weed, water, and harvest the rapidly ripening tomatoes… The blackberries are everywhere… I declared war on blackberries with their runner and thorns… I did damage to the blackberries, but their advance continues… I am considering napalm or some other weapon of mass eradication… So far none has been identified…

Having a variety of tomatoes, we decided to have a tomato tasting… we tasted three kinds of tomatoes… Stupice, San Francisco Fog, and Early Girl… Early girl had the best texture (as should a tomato developed and patented by Monsanto) Stupice, a Czechoslovakian heirloom tasted best. All had suffered a bit by lack of heat followed by lots of heat last week… all were good… Next year I will probably skip the early girl and try a couple of other early tomatoes… but will definably plant Stupice and SF fog…

With the heat, the grapes are ripening… We have four Zinfandel vines growing across the back of the house… our local raccoons have discovered the grapes… its not a surprise… they patrol the yard in search of loose cat food and other edible delights (edible is frequently species specific) unfortunately, we both agree the grapes are edible… and they like them less ripe than we do…making it more challenging, Zinfandel are notorious for ripening unevenly… giving the raccoons a much greater window to feed… They spent much of the night tap dancing on the roof, but did take time to blunder across the back of the house, fowl both fountains, and generally make a mess… The long term solution seems to involve napalm and other seriously destructive strategies… it’s a lot like the black berry issue…

This afternoon T. & I drove over to the coastside… to Half Moon Bay and Princeton Harbor as we do many Sundays… only 7 miles away by air, it is 20 or so miles by road (I think we have discussed this before.) The coastside is rural, it is the coast (hence the unapologetically simple name, “the coastside”…) It is metaphorically a very long way away from here (the suburbs of San Francisco.) We ended up at Sam’s Chowder House… A restaurant and bar overlooking the harbor and beach… it’s a classic New England sea food shack on a California beach… the patio is dog friendy, but we didn’t bring Emma today… they have live music on weekends… They have a lobster roll which Today (the NBC morning TV show) identified as one of the top 5 samwiches in the US… We agree… We ordered two, plus some oysters, a beer for me, wine for T. … We followed with desert… Tina had a homemade ice cream sandwich, I had soft serve ice cream with olive oil and salt… both dreamy… (olive oil on ice cream tastes like butter on ice cream… the salt is texture and bite…)

Found a batch of abandoned green houses. Broken glass, torn plastic sheeting, overgrown with weeds… a weird juxtaposition of indoor and outdoor space. I took photos… Enjoy…

Randy

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